After raising 300 million dollars, Star Citizen is running out of funds. - Sensationalist Headlines

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2019/05/01/exclusive-the-saga-of-star-citizen-a-video-game-that-raised-300-millionbut-may-never-be-ready-to-play/#143610b55ac9 Rough playable modes—alphas, not betas—are used to raise hopes and illustrate work being done. And Roberts has enticed gamers with a steady stream of hype, including promising a vast, playable universe with “100 star systems.” But most of the money is gone, and the game is still far from finished. At the end of 2017, for example, Roberts was down to just $14 million in the bank. He has since raised more money. Those 100 star systems? He has not completed a single one. So far he has two mostly finished planets, nine moons and an asteroid. This is not fraud—Roberts really is working on a game—but it is incompetence and mismanagement on a galactic scale. The heedless waste is fueled by easy money raised through crowdfunding, a Wild West territory nearly free of regulators and rules. Creatives are in charge here, not profit-driven bean counters or deadline-enforcing suits. Up to a point, Roberts has been transparent about where the money has been going. He released years’ worth of financial statements last December. But he won’t say how much he or other top Cloud Imperium execs have made from the project. His wife and his brother both work in senior positions at the company.

I always wondered if it would come down to this. Say what you will about the basis of the game itself, the technology etc. But the studios making Star citizen collectively have a crazy cash burn rate, and there is no way it is sustainable. Market for this is very niche and they are spending millions a month on staff, fancy offices etc. How much longer can it go on, with no release in sight for squadron 42 even

This hit piece brings up Derek Smart's FTC complaint without actually identifying him as Derek Smart. Big think

Who would have thought that a massive waster of money would waste vast majority of money?

Chris roberts' past experience gets cited as a reason to trust him but really, it's reason to not trust him as this is exactly the problem that hit freelancer. Whether he's a good game designer or not, dude needs a publisher/boss to crack the whip and keep him in line.

I still don't understand this game. Like, is this even a game at this point? All that money could have been invested into making this a reality instead of this game, no? Am confusion

Parts are playable if you want to look at what they've come up with

"So far he has two mostly finished planets, nine moons and an asteroid" This makes me imagine a situation where a bunch of SC backers are standing at a table waiting for a report on the state of the game. Roberts walks up with a bag and dumps its contents out on a table and out pours a paperclip, a used toothpick, a ball that rolls off the table. A confused Roberts looks at the bag, then shakes it a little more and finally a piece of toilet paper gently floats out and Roberts gets has a satisfied smile as he admires his handiwork.

We'll see I guess, but that projected beta is quite a long ways off (over a year away, and that will be over 8 years since the Kickstarter). Chris Roberts doesn't have the greatest track record for hitting these milestones on time, but if they manage to deliver then great. I'm not eager to see this game fail but very little about it's development has given me a great deal of confidence as to what it will even be, and I own a copy of the game.

I thought this was old news? Some big stink was raised by Derek Smart and over some of their released funding information, only for the company to thoroughly rebuke it by saying that have revenue streams past the community funding, including several outside investors.

"It is very rare to be doing game development for seven years—that’s not how it works. That’s not normal at all.”" I think this line alone should tell you all you need to know about this article.Big games being in development 7 years is not that unusual...and it is especially not odd for agame that aims to to be revolutionary in a lot of ways, that also required starting entirely from scratch, and is crowdfunded, and had to set up multiple companies even without the typical development problems games go through.

They just secured most outside investors not long ago, this is just sensationalism at the end of the day.

Development on foundational engine shit has mostly stabilized and they're turning their attention to stabilizing the core gameplay and building career gameplay, so it's almost worth being called a game. You can play it right now, go on missions, shoot guys, grab and transport cargo, bounty hunt other players, fly from space down to planets seamlessly, and discover all of the different bugs. It's still not in a good enough place that I can recommend it to anyone who isn't ready for the early access masochism life, but it's actually playable without frequent client/server crashes and missions bugging out and hard-failing constantly. To add to this for anyone who's skeptical, by coincidence the game is having a freefly for a week so you can try it without risking any money. Do not expect a polished, finished experience, or even a halfway-friendly new player experience, because as much as they've done to rewrite CryEngine it's still very much an alpha. I invite anyone who wants help to take it to the megathread or join our Discord (linked in the megathread OP). We will not require you to convert your religion before receiving help with keybinds. The article's core messages seem to be "Chris Roberts and Sandi Gardiner are incompetent and bad people" and "why space game man not release rushed deadline game like EA and others do?" There are a hell of a lot of things to criticize about SC and their development teams and processes, because everyone's human and everyone's a retard sometimes, but this guy's trying too hard to demonize and stigmatize everything.

For reference, a lot of Star Citizen's development has been 'growing pains'. When the game was initially started, the plans were for it to have a much smaller scope than it currently has. It was going to be developed using the cryengine. After a ton of funding and practically wrestling with the engine, they eventually moved to Amazon lumberyard for their engine. If the game had gotten a large amount of funding initially, it would have been much easier for them to start development by creating a brand new engine specifically for the game. It's very difficult to achieve a lot of the technologies that make this game possible. The engine needed to be reworked to allow for much higher levels of precision (32 bit vs 64 bit), object containerization (for being able to walk around while a ship is moving) is something very, very few games are truly capable of doing.

seriously could someone please show me where the standard they're miserably failing to live up to comes from? What company is doing the things CI games is doing but better? because shit like "dire news, Star Citizen has been in development for 7 years" reads like something from a moon person RDR2 took 7 years to make and that was a sequel to an already existing property from one of the most profitable studios on the planet. Ubisoft's been trying to make their own crazy space game with Beyond Good and Evil 2 since the fuckin amenhotep dynasty and afaik there's still no guarantee that isn't vaporware star citizen right now is like the steel frame of a skyscraper. It's clear where everything's going to go, but if you try to walk through it you'll just fall through the floor. AFAIK that's further than anyone's ever gotten before with a project of this scope, so what's the big deal?

The game is also Feature Creep the game, which hasn't helped their time and funding at all. It's certainly one of the most ambitious projects of all time, but at some point they need to double down and focus.

Have they made substantial additions to the scope of the game recently? I know there was a big row over the whole face tracking thing, but my understanding is that was literally just them plugging 3rd party facial recognition software into their animation system

No, it's just something used to try to make the game look bad despite new significant features not being added for quite a few years now. New ships and such still get added, but not so much actual scope changes.

What a shithitpiece of an article, to put it lightly. Using Derek Smart as an unnamed source holy fuck im dying

Parts are playable. Kind of. Yes, it's a game. It's not a good one because there's a shit ton of everything missing. Yeah, that's kind of the point. The people funding this game are by and large rich or hopeful or both space grognards, and a significant chunk of them don't plan on playing anything else but this game, because that's what grognards do. Half full, this game is twenty years too early, and so it takes an enormous amount of logistical leveraging to get it into something that matches what Roberts' wants. Half Empty, Roberts is an egocentric control freak of epic proportions and his wife makes Randy Pitchfork look like the Pope, and they have spent as much on personal aggrandizement and non-game infrastructure as they have on development, and feature creep is very much real, and unlike Warframe instead of hardening a window than incrementally upgrading from that snapshot, Roberts believes he can be the James Cameron of gaming, heedless of the paradigm Cameron's tactics and ethics are now very much not of what you want to be as a creative individual producing public consumptive output. I have no doubts SC will 'launch', I also have no doubts they will hit half of what Roberts wants as hardened features.

I almost miss derek smart nowdays

Been playing the game since the "free to play" period started yesterday. Its fun. There's definitely a game in SC. Read that it was a glorified tech demo, but I can't say that I agree with that notion, after actually playing the game. Hard as fuck to learn the controls and in general how to get by. You're at the moment just made to create a character and is instantly thrown into a space station with close to zero direction. News like this doesn't help my already off-the-scale skepticism with the game. But actually playing it now; I've contemplated making the purchase.

I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if your position is completely accurate. I just have questions that I need answered before I could accept it. Like, Warframe started out as a really bare bones multiplayer looter shooter and from there they added on new bits while remaking old ones. Would it be possible for SC to follow a similar model of development? Isn't the whole problem with a project of this scope that all of the different parallel systems have to be designed in tandem with each other to function properly? Would it be practical- or even feasible- to create a basic space ship game, then add on the different systems one at a time? I thought that the reason you don't do that is because you end up having to go back and remake old systems so that everything will fit together properly. From what I understand you know more about this than I do. Am I just entirely ignorant of how this stuff works?

Look, I don't know a damn thing about this game, but I have read comments from people who are playing it and said that they've already gotten their money's worth. The narrative that this game is a massive scam doesn't fly when every single scam of a game that has been released in just the last year alone (Fallout 76, Anthem, etc.) has been ripped to shreds by the people who bought it. You don't see that kind of shit with Star Citizen. You mostly only see people who don't play it ripping it to shreds, and their reasoning always strikes me as dubious. This article is par for the course.

This actually reminds me of the last big demo they did where Chris boasted about technology they implemented to make ice realistically float in a whiskey glass. Like, it's cool they have an attention to detail like that, but if they're so low on funds, it's worrying. I'm a backer for Star Citizen, so am pretty aware of how ridiculous Derek Smart is, but it's amazing how much a lot of games media takes him seriously. Still, this does make me quite worried for Star Citizen.

It's entirely feasible to be done with the way warframe has done it with SC's budget and even per-ship incentivizations in place as they are, and frankly that's the approach most were expecting when the game started, you'd have a ship, you'd fly your ship to X and ______, fly your ship from X or another place or back home depending on your vocation. Then you'd have a hub, you'd do the same from the hub place and maybe go to another hub place and meet up with people. Then it became not only are there mercantile opposition shcemes but now there are overlying factions, regardless of any player agency, and these factions affect the game world, and then player factions react according to that meta-social blah blah blah, then we're gonna have a single player game to get those people we're not getting with the grognard stick jockey crowd, and then there's gonna be intership interaction, just having a crew is not good enough, another crew needs to shoot at your crew and crew crew pew pewpewpew, and meanwhile they're still literally fighting the engine to work on the first thing they're doing, much less all the other things. A huge difference here is player agency. As stated in the article, Roberts is a batshit control freak, and that is not an overstatement. When WF has stumbled there is a team of people and a swath of feedback from players, many of whom have the necessary ways and means to 'provide meaningful feedback' more detailed and workable than UR GAEM AM GAYS FUK U", and after about three years, you can expect blending of these sources into workable code and workable assets from the team. At CI, Roberts has absolute authority and his extension of that authority is granular as fuck, and there is NO reason for it to be, he doesn't need to be deciding the look of literally every character in the game that isn't procedural, and he's actually kind of trying to do that, to what end I have not the faintest. It's clear Roberts will not be satisfied with anything other than the most _____ space game(s) of all time, regardless of how financially or thematically feasible that is. When he should be happy to get a ship from A to B as a seamless experience inside the ship itself, and that's where anyone sane would have started from. 300 million is shit ton of money, it's still a very finite amount of money for someone wanting to make the sims, elite dangerous, battlefield, and enemy territory all one game, and all of that with dx12 bleeding edge graphics. The theory is you make the most procedural task intensive things as the benchmark and the rest of the system is literally plug and play or variations pulled from the system itself after seeding, so you have a crap ton of work at the beginning but in the last year or so of production you're literally just plugging in things you need in to the super robust procedural system and poof it just appears. Seeing as this design system hasn't really work all that great for anyone else, I don't know why Roberts thinks it gonna work for something this fucking huge in scale and scope, and he's just gonna settle into first place in a big ol easy chair. Companies with more money than god have tried with smaller scale stakes (EA, Squenix, Big Huge, Sony) and been kicked squarely in the dick every time, Roberts is trying the same thing without about four times the content of the largest of these other attempts, and his roadmap just keeps creeping forward with more stuff, that is literally just stuff.

Let me point out that, before the Lumberyard hop, Star Citizen standardized on CryEngine 3.7 with some elements of 3.8 backported down. Amazon forked CryEngine at 3.8 and made it into Lumberyard. Lumberyard is based on CryEngine 3.8, and Amazon has a development repo from the day after the ink dried (I assume) all the way to their current, well-customized present day. It can be assumed that CIG grabbed as early back in those builds as possible so they obtained what is effectively CryEngine 3.8 but is legally Lumberyard licensed from Amazon. This may also be why Crytek got pissed and sued them for leaving, because CIG could now use what's 99.9% Crytek code without licensing it from Crytek. I generally kneejerk against any claims that Chris Roberts is a smooth-talking scammer but that would legitimately be a clever bamboozle. TL;DR Lumberyard is CryEngine No, not really. What's actually happening, I feel, is that the ambition was always massive, even at the point when they cut off stretch goals at $65 million (and are now >$220 million), but because they have always epically failed at maintaining a coherent searchable information stream only people who dedicate a casual amount of time a week every week for months at a time have a solid understanding of the project's state, goals, and trajectory. People who only pay attention to SC when their favourite gaming site posts a story about them two or three times a year can't understand, and can't be expected to understand, the whole state of the project, they just hear "wow it's Chris Roberts up to his tricks again". Now that some of those lofty goals that seemed impossible back in 2013 are becoming tangible things and the true breadth of the vision is starting to become visible -- procedurally-generated planets that sometimes come with large cities with fenced-off walkable zones of intense detail, a land ownership claims system so players can fight over uninhabited space on those planets, in-game facerig tech -- that low-engagement people are discovering they were planned for the first time and call it mad scope creep. The plan was always there, it just didn't make sense to enter the biathalon before they could crawl and not everyone got the flier because in their defense they weren't standing on the right street corner when the news cruise went by on a Thursday last June. The scope hasn't changed in the last 2-3 years, some people just didn't realize just how big it was set as of the last time it changed. Remember Derek Smart in 2015, 2016, 2017? Good, now you know what Derek Smart's up to in 2019. I don't think it's going to flop and I think this article is a hit piece coated in mud end to end, and I'm FP's #1 Star Citizen cheerleader, but I'm gonna tell you to hold back until it is what you consider "a game" as opposed to a buggy if ambitious alpha. It isn't going anywhere so you lose nothing by waiting, and if by bastardly chance the worst happens and SC does throw itself into a spike pit you saved your money.

What an absolutely shit article

a trespasser slipped by a security gate and entered Chris Roberts’ L.A. home. Inside, Madison Peterson, Roberts’ former common-law wife, with whom he had a long on-and-off relationship, was startled and feared her young daughter could be harmed or kidnapped. Peterson later identified the trespasser as Sandi Gardiner, who is now Roberts’ wife (for the second time) and a cofounder of Cloud Imperium. Roberts reported the incident to police, and a California judge issued a temporary restraining order that required Gardiner to stay 100 yards away from Peterson, who claimed in her temporary restraining order application that Gardiner had been stalking and threatening both her and her daughter for nearly three years. What the fuck? They're saying that Sandi Gardiner had a restraining order on her due to trespassing on Roberts' property? That's both bizarre and not really relevant to Star Citizen's development, surely?

Try dealing with her in person.